Tag Archives: create

Dec 18 2012

Found a Cross Stitch App! Stitch Sketch Review

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Found a cross stitch app for iPhone and iPad! It’s called StitchSketch! The website also has a download for PC computers. The lite version of the app is free and the full version is only $5! It takes some getting use to especially on my phone because the screen is so small. But it allows you to save and send/email the charts as images and pdf files. It can also upload your designs to your DropBox account.  This is the only app I can find that allows you to create your own designs as well as turn a picture into a cross stitch pattern. I’m so pumped for this and to keep learning more things about it because I no longer have to draw the patterns out by hand! Bottom line, this app is fun but not for large or detailed projects because it doesn’t have backstitch or half stitches. Now, I just need to take the time to get familiar with the program.

Dec 14 2012
ready

Simple Biscuit Recipe

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I have this biscuit recipe because my husband requires bread at all meals. He doesn’t always get it but he’d prefer to have it. Here is my simple biscuit recipe I sometimes make him because it is easy and simple to make and it doesn’t take all day to make.

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 5 Tbsp butter, cut into tiny pieces
  • 2-4 Tbsp honey, depending on how sweet you want them, I normally do 3
  • 3/4 cup milk, whole, buttermilk, 2% I’ve used all and prefer whole, they all change the taste a little bit

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 400° and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper
  2. In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and butter until it’s coarse
  3. In a small bowl, combine milk and honey
  4. Pour milk mixture into flour mixture and combine until all of the ingredients are no longer dry
  5. Put dough on a flour surface and kneed for a couple of minutes
  6. Roll dough into a log a couple of inches thick
  7. from log, cut 1.5-2 inch thick biscuits and place on cookie sheet

    biscuit recipe

    cut and ready to be baked

  8. Bake for 10-12 minutes
  9. Enjoy!

 

biscuit recipe

yum!

 

Dec 5 2012
guacamole recipe

My Guacamole Recipe

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guacamole recipeOne thing I love is chips and dip, especially tortilla chips and guacamole! But I find it difficult to find good guacamole at grocery stores. One time I accidentally bought guacamole flavored dip! So it wasn’t real! It was full of randomness and things I couldn’t pronounce that didn’t need to eat. I made it a mission to make my own. Here is the guacamole recipe that I came up with, with the help of my husband. 🙂

Ingredients:

  • avocados
  • tomato, chopped and without seeds
  • onion, chopped
  • cilantro, chopped
  • juice of half of a lime
  • olive oil
  • salt
  • pepper

Directions:

  1. Peel, remove seeds, and mash avocados in a small to medium bowl
  2. add tomato, onion, cilantro, olive oil and lime juice to avocado and mix
  3. season with salt and pepper and stir into dip

I usually do 2 large ripe avocados, if they’re still hard, it’s difficult to make dip, so go for the ones that are a bit mushy. I also use one roma tomato, half of a small red onion and a handful of cilantro before it’s chopped. But the amount of all of the ingredients completely depends on your own taste and the amount you want to make.

 

Dec 4 2012

Mozzarella Cilantro Burger Recipe

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One favorite in my apartment is burgers! Mozzarella Cilantro burgers! They were a favorite when we lived in a house too, when we had a real grill. Oh I do love a good grilled burger on a toasted bun.  The mozzarella cilantro burgers are delicious and usually we have the ingredients sitting in the fridge so it’s nice if we have a craving for a good burger we can make one that day.

Ingredients:

  • 1 lbs. ground beef, I use 80%/20% because it forms patties better than leaner ground beef. I usually cook them on my George Forman and that cooks a lot of the fat out them. 
  • 1 bag/2 cups of shredded mozzarella
  •  a couple handfuls of chopped cilantro
  • some ketchup
  • 1 egg

mozzarella cilantro burger

 

Directions:

1. put meat, mozzarella, egg and squeeze some ketchup into a bowl

2. chop cilantro and put into the bowl

mozzarella cilantro burger

 

3. get your hands messy and mix the ingredients together

4. then make patties, I have a little patty maker it’s handy but not necessary 

mozzarella cilantro burger

ready to be grilled

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5. Grill them up, on a grill, on a George Foreman, in a skillet, or my new fave, in the broiler! For medium burgers on the broiler, use room temperature patties, colder ones take more time, broil for 7 minutes, flipping the patties at the 3 minute mark.

6. Enjoy the goodness of a mozzarella cilantro burger!

Dec 3 2012

Blackberry Muffin Recipe with Greek Yogurt and Steel Cut Oats

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So it’s going to be a food week! Today I’ll start with breakfast, a muffin recipe! Blackberry muffins with greek yogurt and steel cut oats.

When buying fruit out of season, it’s always a guessing game as to when it’s going to go bad. I had boughten some blackberries a few days ago and decided I needed to do something with them before they went bad. I decided on blackberry muffins! I looked through a lot of recipes and ended up pulling different things from a few them and created my own to make them somewhat of a complete breakfast? Or really so I can say they have all of these things in them, they must be healthy 🙂 I tend to make the batter the night before to bake the next day because they can be time consuming.

Here is my muffin recipe:

  • 1 cup precooked steel cut oats I usually do 1/2 cup oats to 1 cup boiling water
  • 1 cup greek vanilla yogurt
  • 1/4 cup honey
  • 1/4 cup oil I used canola but vegetable oil should be good too
  • 3/4 cup light brown sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 cup flour
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • ~ 1 cup blackberries carefully cut into smaller pieces, I quartered mine

Directions:

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°
  2. in a medium bowl, mix the oats, yogurt and honey

    wet ingredients 1

    cooked steel cut oats, greek yogurt, honey

  3. in a small bowl, mix oil egg, and sugar until well combined

    sugar mixture

    brown sugar, egg, oil

  4. combine sugar mixture with oat mixture
  5. sift the flour, salt, baking soda and powder today and add to wet ingredients

    dry ingredients

    I dont have a fancy sifter so I use my mesh strainer

  6. gently fold in blackberries, they can lightly coated in flour to prevent them from sinking in the batter

    fruit

    blackberries cut into fourths

  7. bake, in a greased or lined muffin tin, for ~ 15-20 minutes, until golden brown and toothpick comes out clean

    yum!

  8. Enjoy!

I would say that this recipe makes around 12 muffins, but I don’t really know because I use the muffin tin and my George Foreman, don’t judge me :), and those muffins are tiny compared to my muffin tin for my oven. Also, you don’t have to use blackberries. Blueberries work great with this recipe too!

I hope you love these muffins!

Nov 28 2012

Basket Weave Pattern Knit Scarf

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My next project was a basket weave pattern scarf for my husband. I’m using a crimson color wool yarn on size 8 needles. The pattern I decided on was:

  • Cast on 30
  • Knit 5 Purl 5 for 5 rows
  • Purl 5 Knit 5 for 5 rows
  • Repeat until it’s long enough
  • Bind off

It is a skinny scarf for a man but the basket weave pattern is very nice because it gives the scarf texture without being girly.  I think it will be good when it’s really cold so he can bundle up with it.

I don’t know when I’ll finish but hopefully it’ll be soon so I can post a picture.

rusty, basket weave pattern

This is Rusty hard at work making sure my yarn ball doesn’t roll off of the couch while I’m knitting.

 Finally finished in June!

Nov 25 2012
cheese

Chili Recipe

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We stayed home for Thanksgiving. It was nice weekend just the three of us and in the tradition of Thanksgiving, we needed to make something that would give us a lot of leftovers. I didn’t really want to tackle a turkey again so we went with chili. I say we because Joshua helped A LOT with this since I have never made chili before and we weren’t using a recipe. It turned out delicious! Here is our chili recipe.

Heres what we used:

  • 2 28oz cans of crushed tomatoes
  • 2 little cans of tomato paste
  •  1lbs. ground sirlion
  • 1lbs. ground mild italian sausage
  • 1/2 package of bacon
  • 2 poblano peppers, chopped
  • 1 red bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 can black beans, drained
  • 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
  • 1/4 of a garlic bulb chopped
  • 4 large basil leaves chopped
  • a lot of chili powder
  • a lot of oregano
  • black pepper
  • salt
  • powered mustard
  • celery salt
  • tarragon
  • some beer
  • cheese
  1.  put crushed tomatoes and tomato paste in a big pot, and put it on the stove to simmer
  2. I then cooked the meat in a skillet, I seasoned the sirloin with red and black pepper, salt and chili powder while it browned, then I cooked the sausage, followed with the bacon, and then put it all in the pot with the crushed tomatoes
  3. leaving a little bit of the bacon grease in the pan, I sautéed the peppers, onions, and garlic a little bit to get them to soften and sweeten just a bit but still leaving them with a crunch to them, and put it all in the pan
  4. add the basil to the chili and stir to combine it all
  5. add some beer, we used an ale, probably about 6oz, but it’s really up to the person making it, but too much, will make it runny
  6. then it was time to season the chili, which consisted of throwing a lot of spices in it and tasting it until we liked it
  7. we left it to simmer, covered, for a few hours, stirring occasionally
  8. when it was time to eat, we topped it with some shredded colby jack, but cheddar would be good on it too
yum

Chili!

It ended up having just a little bit of a kick to it, well in my opinion it did, but I don’t handle spicy food too well, but it was amazing! It was nice to eat chili on this chilly weekend. 🙂 It’s thick enough to make a chili dog, or what I did when it got a bit too spicy for me, scoop a cracker into it and eat it that way.
cheese

cheese!

Definitely had enough leftovers to last and some to even freeze for other chilly winter days!

 

Nov 23 2012
background complete

Paw Print, How to Cross Stitch

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After I drew my paw print pattern I got to stitching! Here’s how to cross stitch. First I’ll go a little backwards with photos of doing the cross stitch with a border I’m putting around it. But a starting note, remember, is that there is no knot at the end of the thread, you simply leave about an inch on the back side of the fabric.

step 1

take the needle through to the front side of the canvas from the bottom hole

step 2

pull through and go to the next row over, up and to the right diagonally, pull needle all the way through to the back of the canvas

step 3

next go to the hole directly underneath the hole in the previous step and pull the needle through to the right side of the fabric

step 4

after you’ve done another diagonal stitch, go to the hole underneath the one previously used and pull needle through to the right side of the fabric

step 5

now go up and diagonal to the left

step 5

now go up and diagonal to the left

step 6

the first X is complete and now repeat

step 7

go diagonal again to complete the second X

In my pattern I have a lot of half squares which could be confusing. But really it either means a half of stitch, literally a half of a stitch where the needle goes through the center of the square making the diagonal half of it’s usual length.

with green

Pattern Complete

This is the pattern complete! But I needed a way to finish it, make it actually look complete. So I decided to make a border around it.

green

It still quite wasn’t what I hoped so I added another border.

red and green

almost complete

That looks much better to me, so now I’m going to fill it in with a cream colored thread to leave no square unstitched.

background complete

background is filled in

To finish the stitching part of this I decided to backstitch around the paw print to highlight it. This is easier, I think, than back stitching in sewing because it has the holes to put your needles in to make your stitches the same length and it is often used as a finishing stitch in cross stitch.

Stitching is Finished!

I put a pencil next to it to give a size reference. Now I need to figure out how to turn this into an ornament.

Nov 21 2012

More Cross Stitch Patterns

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I’ve drawn more cross stitch patterns! I’ve gotten the pattern making bug! But thank goodness for pencils and erasers because I used them a lot! 🙂

I made more patterns because I made Rusty a cross stitch pattern, which will be turned into an ornament that I decided my husband and I needed one too. Granted they are very basic, beginner cross stitch patterns, but they are my first group of patterns I’ve ever drawn. I can’t really draw that well to begin with but I wanted to try.

I have decided not to do a color legend for these because I wanted to keep my options open, as in, I wanted to make sure I had enough thread in my thread mess ball.

needle cross stitch pattern

my pattern

I couldn’t decide what to make for Joshua, my husband, so I sketched a couple of his hobbies and let him choose which one I made.

running shoe cross stitch pattern

running shoe

climber cross stitch pattern

mountain climber

snowboard and goggles cross stitch pattern

snowboard and goggles

He picked the mountain climber so now I have two more ornaments to stitch and make into ornaments! Still deciding on whether or not to backstitch the year onto it.

Graph paper really is a girls best friend when trying to draw cross stitch patterns.

Nov 19 2012

How to Cross Stitch

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I feel like the holiday season is a popular cross stitch theme. Mainly because I have cross stitched and finished three cross stitch stockings. So I thought I’d show how to cross stitch.

To start with new thread, there is no knot at the end of the thread, you simply leave about an inch on the back side of the fabric and your stitches will make it tight.

Here’s the basic cross pattern, thank goodness for graph paper:

the . are where the needle goes through the needlework fabric

the solid lines represent thread.

step 1 how to cross stitchstep 2 how to cross stitchstep 3 how to cross stitchstep 4 how to cross stitchstep 5step 6step 7

Drew the same row of Xs underneath because it was getting crowded on the top row with all of the numbersstep 8step 9 and 10cross complete You are literally making an X with your thread. Going left to right, when all of the / are done in that row you go right to left with a stitch that looks like this \  completing the X in cross stitch.

To end make sure your needle is on the back, wrong side, or your canvas and pull needle under a couple stitches to secure the thread in place.